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Written by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Miles Potter. Until Oct. 13 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George Street East. StratfordFestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600.

It has been 20 years since the Stratford Festival produced Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play that famously demands space, distance and time.

When O’Neill finished it, he asked his wife to wait 25 years after his death to have it performed. The play, his most celebrated and also his most personal, “written in tears and blood” as he described it, was full of ghosts from his past. And it probably disturbed O’Neill’s own ghost when Carlotta Monterey went against his wishes and Long Day’s Journey Into Night was already on Broadway four years after he died in 1953.

But there’s something fitting about the decades-long break from the play at the festival, last seen in 1995 starring the late greats William Hutt as the patriarch James Tyrone and Peter Donaldson as the eldest son Jamie, with Martha Henry as Mary, Tom McCamus as Edmund, and Martha Burns as the Tyrone family maid Cathleen. It’s as if the script requires a period of isolation, for its wounds to fester and its gut to rot before getting dusted off once more, and its family traumas are aired for paying audiences.

There’s a gearing-up on the side of the viewer as well — as the title suggests, the play is a slow burn, demanding patience in watching a family’s disintegration almost in real time. Miles Potter’s production, opening this week at the festival, runs three and a half hours with two intermissions. And though handled by an embarrassment of theatrical riches in terms of talent — it’s hard to find too many faults with this company, besides a general err on the safe side — the journey of this masterpiece of American theatre is thoroughly and painstakingly felt.

The pairing of Scott Wentworth and Seana McKenna as the heads of the Tyrone family is ingenious — not only do they share decades at the festival (his 24 to her 27), he’s also directing her turn as Julius Caesar this season. Their history is felt onstage, and their initial flirtations are giddy in the play’s first act. Their resentments are deep, too, which get far more playtime in the festival’s intimate Studio Theatre, particularly when joined by their two sons Jamie (Gordon S. Miller, following a revelatory role in Jillian Keiley’s Bakkhai last season) and Edmund (Charlie Gallant, a Shaw Festival transplant making a sensitive, understated Stratford debut).

Gloom runs through the veins of the Tyrone family. James is a miser, running off the fumes of his long-gone matinee idol status, alienating his family by favouring poor land purchases over their health and happiness. Jamie is a former actor who never reached his father’s level of success, self-absorbed, a drunk, and a danger to himself and others in many ways. Edmund is a wayward wannabe poet, with booze-soaked stints as a sailor bringing adventure and a serious case of tuberculosis, all to fill his overall feelings of isolation (and the stand-in for O’Neill himself, in this highly autobiographical story).

Mary, the central figure of the play, carries the most demons: a lost father, youth, son, faith, looks. All haunt her and drive years of morphine addiction. The insularity of the family, confined to their summer cottage by the sea, sends these offences in a circular motion, swirling through the house like the eye of a storm.

Only Cathleen (a charming Amy Keating), with her upbeat Irish humour, offers a bit of joy to this household — and emphasizes how doomed this family really is. Peter Hartwell’s set and Steve Lucas’s lighting visualize that isolation — laying out the cottage’s plain living room in naturalistic detail, but showing a vague, icy blue fog out of the windows. To the family, especially Mary, the outside world is mysterious, unknown and disorienting.

Potter’s interpretation digs into O’Neill’s signature verbal barbs (“Maybe you can sweat some of the booze fat off your middle,” James says to Jamie as they head outside) and 180-degree emotional turns. This gives the first act a crack of intensity, an electric streak of unpredictability. But as the play progresses, moods depress, subtexts clarify and addictions are indulged, a weight descends on the action that stifles the initial energy.

Lucas’s lighting darkens on the periphery and intensifies on the living room table, and the audience’s own energy powers down. The relentless insults, the never-ending narcissism, the scapegoating and the blaming is tiresome, no matter how searing O’Neill’s jabs. The navel-gazing in Long Day’s Journey Into Night puts any criticism against selfie-loving millennials to shame, and puts up an almost impenetrable barrier to stop the audience from not only witnessing the journey of the Tyrones, but going on it with them.

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